Monday, September 5, 2011

Story Time

Pre-1987 - My dad is living in West Philly, practically rent-free because his apt owner, Doug, is redo-ing the house for his wife. She-who-must-not-be-named and Doug divorce. Doug rids himself of all furniture that the dark lord liked (ie carries it upstairs and tells my dad to take it, or else). Dining room table plus chairs now in my dad's possession.

1987 - My parents are married.

1989 - My parents move to the suburbs, bringing all furniture with them. I am born. Chairs reupholstered sometime before I turn 3 years old (aka before I remember).

1990 something- My parents buy a new dining room table and chairs and the old set is moved into our playroom.

2007 - My brother converts playroom into music studio. Table and chairs are his new desk.

Now - I move to grad school, my brother INSISTS I take the dingy old table and chairs. I am inspired to reupholster.

I seriously suck at furniture "before" pictures. Just like I suck at food "after" pictures. This is the old fabric. It didn't look half bad on those chairs 20 years ago. Pleather plus mustard yellow were still "in"-ish.

These are basically different for each piece of furniture. For my chairs, I had to unscrew 4 reinforcements from the bottom of the chair. To this was attached a wooden base that had the (ugly, old) fabric covering it. The base is the first picture. The fabric was only attached by head nails, I suppose because my dad was too lazy to go find a staple gun. Hey, me too! I measured my fabric/quilt batting according to the size of the base, leaving myself between 3-4 inches of the canvas on each side (the batting was exactly covering the base). I recommend 4 inches, but I managed okay with 3 inches in some cases, though it was much more difficult to nail down. I did this hurriedly and not very neatly, as can be seen from the pictures. To make sure your upholstering is neat on the edges, I HIGHLY recommend a staple gun, but I didn't have one on hand, and I prefer my handmade look (I can justify any type of laziness). To finish it up, I screwed the reinforcements back onto the base and VIOLA! I have new-ish chairs.

PS. To give you an idea of how these chairs have aged, when I went to unscrew the reinforcements, I found that some of them were no longer attached to the chair itself, but ONLY screwed into the base of the chair! So I had to glue them back into their places and wait a day before I finished screwing the chair back together. I didn't have wood glue, but apparently Elmer's "Glue-All" functions quite well as a wood glue. Pretty cool!